448 myths · Page 8 of 15
Ezekiel gave an uncertain answer about rescue. The three men declared they were ready to die regardless. That declaration was when the rescue became certain.
Nebuchadnezzar wanted to worship Daniel after the dream. Daniel refused. The king removed him from Dura before the furnace decree could force a confrontation.
The field hands never got their lunch. An angel took the pot and the prophet holding it, by a fistful of hair, from Judea to a sealed pit in Babylon.
The king asked whose daughter she was and got nothing, again. When she finally answered him, she used the same breath to ask about Vashti.
Before the decree, Haman offered Mordecai shalom. Mordecai answered with a verse from Isaiah. Some peace is camouflage for violence.
Before casting the lot, Haman interrogated each sign of the zodiac. Every constellation gave him the same answer: do not touch Israel.
Persians in Shushan had begun telling Jews the date. Mordecai stopped three children walking home from school and asked what they had learned.
Mordecai's speech before the fast named every protection that was gone. No king, no prophet, no escape route. Then he asked the people to pray anyway.
The king asked what a deserving man should receive. Haman assumed the question was about him and answered in detail. He was wrong.
The firstborn was in the room. So was the son who would be king. Jacob sent for neither of them, because neither one could get a body past the border.
Saul lied to his two officers on the road back. The prophet had promised him victory, he said, and high commands for his sons in the morning.
An officer heard Elisha promise cheap flour the next day and asked if heaven had windows. Elisha said he would see it and not eat it. The crowd trampled him.
Jonah did not flee from fear. He fled because he knew God would forgive Nineveh. He refused to save the empire destroying Israel.
The Torah of Moses had been lost in the Temple so long no one searched for it. When it turned up in the walls, the king who heard it wept.
Tell me what I saw, the king said, and then tell me what it means. Otherwise you have all been lying to me and you die this afternoon.
Darius fed the lions until they were full, then threw Daniel's accusers in. He had to know whether the lions had spared Daniel or had merely been fed.
On Simhat Torah 1609 in Safed, a mystic dreamed that Moses was laid on the reading table and unrolled from Genesis to Deuteronomy like a scroll.
Elijah never died. He was taken to heaven in a whirlwind and has moved between worlds ever since, present at every seder, every circumcision, every crossing.
Joseph told Pharaoh the famine would last seven years, but Jacob's arrival canceled it after two. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak explains what Joseph knew when he spoke.
He had them wash first. What he meant to hand over was the date. Then the Divine Presence came down over the bed and the words went out of him.
Every seder has a cup for Elijah. Every circumcision has his chair. But a tradition older than both holds that Elijah is not present everywhere. He is hidden.
She went out the way a king goes out of a house he will not see again, stopping at the door, putting her mouth to the stone, saying goodbye to the pillars.
Jonah did not flee from God out of fear. He fled because he already knew what mercy would cost him, and he had already paid that price once.
The sailors on Jonah's ship were not cruel men. They tried their idols, cast lots, jettisoned their cargo, and rowed for shore before they touched him.
God told Samuel he had placed himself between two good byways, and named that position as the reason for three gifts: life, righteousness, and glory.
Three hundred years before Josiah was born, a prophet called him by name. The king who arrived had been expected all along.
Elisha sent his servant ahead with his staff to revive a dead child. The boy did not move. The rabbis knew exactly why the wood failed.
The woman at Endor had never heard of Samuel. She called him up anyway, and the thing that came out of the ground told her whose king was in her house.
Hillel bathed on Fridays and called it a commandment. Then he turned to Saul to show what happens when a man abandons his own soul.
When Israel wept for meat in the wilderness, Moses did not pray for quail. He asked God to end his life. Sifrei Devarim examined the prayer word by word.
